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Thursday, June 28, 2012

The Wild Huntsman

Thus, Tarzan has as ancestor Woden. It would be difficult to find a more highly placed forefather than the All-Father.
Perhaps the great god of the North is not dead but is in hiding. It
pleased the Wild Huntsman to direct the falling star of Wold Newton near
the two coaches. Thus, in a manner of speaking, he fathered the
children of the occupants. The mutated and recessive genes would be
reinforced, kept from being lost, by the frequent marriages among the
descendants of the irradiated parents.
—Philip José Farmer, Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke

In November 1795, after undergoing a
harrowing adventure in France, Sir Percy Blakeney—The Scarlet Pimpernel—decided
to call a Conclave of some of the most remarkable people of his time to plan
how to influence the political and revolutionary climate sweeping across
Europe. These extraordinary people, many of them heroes in their own right,
were the ancestors of a group of mutant supermen who have played a large role
in our affairs—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Wildman, Captain Nemo, and the lord of the
jungle, among many others.

It is December 13, 1795. The ionized
radiation accompanying a meteor strike in the tiny village of Wold Newton,
Yorkshire, endows Blakeney and his fellow Conclave attendees with a boost—a
nova of genetic splendor—that will result in those supermen and women.

Or does it?

A mysterious time traveler has come
to Wold Newton to witness the momentous event, and is quickly drawn into
investigating a series of impossible murders heralded by an ominous tolling,
murders never recorded in the history books. As the Conclave guests divide into
camps, and hopes for a solution to the European problem dwindle, so too
dwindles hope for the future. For if the enigmatic time voyager cannot overcome
the machinations of an immortal trickster and ensure that the right people are at
the right place, at the right time, then not only will his own future and past
be erased, but the whole of history itself will be rewritten…